Trying to recapture the moon landing 50 years ago this weekend is like mind-streaming a beloved old movie of that year, say “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” There are vivid glimpses—Neil Armstrong stepping down on the moon’s powdery gray surface, Buzz Aldrin standing next to that wire-stiffened American flag—but the drama seems to be unreeling in another, elusive dimension.
That’s not surprising. Fewer than a third of Americans living today are old enough to have watched the flickering black-and-white images of Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin on their bulky cathode-tube TVs. A 50-year span covers a lot of American history. It was roughly half a century from the end of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency to the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln or from the start of the Civil War to the first shots of World War I.
